Why justification still matters.

Faith, righteousness, and the forensic act of grace.

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While it might be disadvantageous to rank what is the most or least important doctrines within the Body of Christ, there is no more demarcating tenet than that of justification. Famously, justification served as a pivotal incentive in the events that culminated in the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, with figures such as Jan Hus, John Calvin, and Martin Luther, among many others, refusing to conform to the established understanding of the doctrine. Even in the aftermath of that movement, though, justification has continued to receive pointed and passionate attention among theologians of various denominational backgrounds and proclivities. In the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, the theological landscape continued to rupture over the doctrine of justification, with the so-called “New Perspective on Paul” offering a novel take on the Pauline understanding of justification by emphasizing its social dimensions and the re-amalgamation of God’s covenant community to include both Jews and Gentiles. Soteriological upheaval brought about by Judaizing preachers is, in this view, of less concern than the church’s new covenantal status. Symptomatically, though, this results in a de-emphasis on the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, which has major salvific implications.

Properly speaking, justification is a legal and forensic act wherein God the Father declares sinners righteous on the basis of the righteous life, death, and resurrection of the person of his Son, the Christ of God. A person justly deserving of God’s condemnatory word is, according to the gospel, made to hear his justifying word, wherein he or she is reckoned blameless as a result of Jesus’s sin-bearing and propitiatory work (Rom. 3:25; 1 Pet. 2:24; 1 John 2:2). Professor and theologian Matthew Barrett defines justification as a divine occurrence that happens “at a specific moment in time when the sinner trusts in Christ alone,” by which God the Father “declares the sinner ‘not guilty,’” which he is just in doing since “his judicial verdict is not based on the righteousness of the believer (not even in the slightest) but rather on the righteousness of another, namely Christ, in whom the believer has placed his trust” (194).

Both the Old Testament and the New refer to justification, a concept that is closely related to the notion of “acquittal” or “non-condemnation” (Deut. 25:1; Prov. 17:15; Rom. 8:1). Though not limited to this portrait, essential to the biblical understanding of justification is the legal milieu of a judge dispensing with a verdict on a criminal. (In Justification by Faith: A Matter of Death and Life, Gerhard O. Forde attests, as the subtitle suggests, that this doctrine is better understood through the lens of dying and rising again.) The vision of the prophet Zechariah, recorded in Chapter 3 of his oracle, offers a profound illustration of this event (Zech. 3:1–5). While the courtroom gallery certainly anticipates the judge’s decree to convict the accused, and rightly so in light of his unequivocal guilt, when the gavel falls, it announces his exoneration. The sinner is cleared of the charges due to his sin and publicly, definitively, and forensically declared righteous, not because his consequences have been evaporated or cast aside but because someone else has endured them for him.

It is in this way, therefore, that “justification, understood as God’s creative counterstatement to sin, is,” as Jonathan A. Linebaugh puts it, “a word of new creation anchored in the cross” (187). In the absence of any righteousness, God in Christ descends to “fulfill all righteousness” (Matt. 3:15), whereby he is able to be “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26). By imputing the sins of mankind to the Son, for which he decisively atones in his cross and empty tomb, God the Father executes the justifying act of merciful non-imputation of sin and pro-imputation of righteousness for those who believe (2 Cor. 5:19–21), recapitulating their right standing with him. The objective accomplishment of Christ’s death and resurrection effectively brings the eschatological righteousness of God into “the present time” (Rom. 3:26), according to which condemned sinners are justified. “Justification is the final verdict,” Linebaugh attests, “a forensic word from the future spoken in the enactment of God’s eschatological judgment that is the ‘now’ of Jesus’s death (and resurrection; cf. Rom. 4:25)” (14). In his Christian Theology, Alister E. McGrath agrees:

[Justification] is a complex and all-embracing notion, which anticipates the verdict of the final judgment (Rom. 8:30–34), declaring in advance the verdict of ultimate acquittal. The believer’s present justified Christian existence is thus an anticipation of, and advance participation in, deliverance from the wrath to come, and an assurance in the present of the final eschatological verdict of acquittal (Rom. 5:9–10). (250)

It is profitable to return to Linebaugh for a moment, who expands on the eschatologically present verdict inherent to the announcement of justification, which is tethered to the event of the cross. Linebaugh puts it like this:

The cross, however, is not the justification of God alone. As the καὶ that links the predicates “just” and “justifier” (Rom. 3:26b) indicates, the death of Jesus is simultaneously the event of divine judgment and human justification; it is, to borrow Justyn Terry’s phrase, “the justifying judgment of God.” According to the righteous decree of the righteous God (Rom. 2:5; 3:5–6), sinners “are worthy of death” (Rom. 1:32; cf. 6:23a). The death of Jesus, in the first instance, is the demonstration of divine righteousness because it is the enactment of this decree: the cross is the condemnation of sin and as such the fulfillment of “the righteous decree of the law” (Rom. 8:3–4; cf. Gal. 3:10–13). In other words, the gracious sending and self-giving of Jesus (Rom. 3:24–25; 8:32; Gal. 2:20), is not the circumvention of God’s contention with sinful humanity (Rom. 1:18; 3:9–20). It is, rather, the completion of that contention in the eschatological judgment that is God’s condemnation of sin in the flesh of his son. But — and here we return to the linking of “just” and “justifier” — the condemnation of sin (Rom. 8:3) grounds the non-condemnation of the sinner (Rom. 8:1). The cross, then, is the “correspondingly” that connects human righteousness and God’s wrath (Rom. 1:18; 3:5), but the “correspondingly” of divine judgment — mysteriously and mercifully — contains and effects the “nevertheless” of justification (Rom. 3:24, 26). The arrival of God’s eschatological judgment in the “now” of Jesus’s death rewrites God’s future word of justification (Rom. 2:13; 3:20) in the present tense (Rom. 3:24, 28; cf. the aorist in 5:1). Justification is not a separate verdict from the one. God will speak at final judgment, nor is it only “an anticipation of the future verdict.” Justification is the final verdict: a forensic word from the future spoken in the arrival of God’s eschatological judgment that is the “now” of Jesus’s death (and resurrection; cf. Rom. 4:25). (189–90)

Justification is indispensable to the Christian life. It offers not the threads of timeworn theological dogma but the very lifeblood of faith, assurance, and devotion. Beyond any creedal formula, the doctrine of justification remains central to the enthusiasm with which the church embraces its commission to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19). Those who are immersed in the waters of baptism are, therefore, united to the Triune God who justifies the ungodly. Insofar as the scriptural impression of justification is faithfully conveyed, the church is safeguarded from deceptive notions of conferring merit via human effort and insulated against the legalistic tendency to collapse justification and sanctification into a Romanist theory of religion. Accordingly, this doctrine ensconces God’s sovereignty and sufficiency as the undergirding tenets of faith and hope. “Justification,” writes Thomas Cranmer, a sixteenth-century English reformer, “is the office of God only, and it is not a thing which we render unto him, but which we receive of him; not which we give to him, but which we take of him, by his free mercy, and by the only merits of his most dearly-beloved Son, our only Redeemer, Saviour, and Justifier, Jesus Christ” (131). Consequently, the church’s mission and worship are thoroughly shaped by its confession that sinners are declared righteous on account of Christ alone.

Grace and peace to you.

Works cited:

Matthew Barrett, 40 Questions About Salvation, 40 Questions Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2018).

Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters, edited by John Edmund Cox (Cambridge: University Press, 1846).

Jonathan A. Linebaugh, The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2022).

Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 6th edition (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).